The Hear Our Hearts bus visited Narromine Christian School for the first time last week to provide free ear health checks and education to students.
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The Hear Our Hearts project has been popular among a number of communities in the Central West, which seeks to provide ongoing ear checks to children in the community.
Hear Our Heart support teacher Cathy Green said the project was organised through hearing support teachers who identified that regular hearing checks were not occurring in their communities.
As a result the Hear Our Heart charity seeks to provide support with the identification, treatment pathway and improvement of educational outcomes for children involved.
“As we know a lot of learning difficulties are from hearing problems that kids have,” said Ms Green.
The Hear Our Hearts bus project is not for profit and not government funded and relies on donations and fundraising to allow it to continue. Ms Green said they are fortunate to have many audiologists volunteer their time to the Bus.
“We are the first in Australia and the first in probably a few places, we've had our hearing teachers go to conferences in other places as in NZ, and they're quite interested in doing something like this in their communities.”
“We are going pretty good at the moment, but we still need more volunteers, more committees in these small little towns.”
Committees are based in Narromine, Trangie, Dunedoo, Yeoval, Gilgandra, Wellington and Warren, with plans to extend out to Nyngan.
“We are trying to organise these committees so they are looking after their own region.”
“They can get together the people they think have the concerns, and once they get together a few, we can come out and do a community day,” said Ms Green.
The project has two paid staff and is run by a dedicated committee of volunteers.